SEO Contest Winner: OER Commons - 90 Day Update

Editor's note: We asked our SEO contest winner
Keri Morgret to give us an update on the status of her charity
campaign. She has graciously allowed us to publish her thoughts for
this newsletter.

A big thanks to the Bruce Clay team for sponsoring my scholarship to
SMX Advanced in June and to Bruce Clay's Basic and Advanced SEOToolSet
training. Both events were a great learning experience, and I've been
able to use much of that information in my work with the OER Commons Web site -- a project of ISKME, a non-profit educational research institute.

I started working with the OER Commons site in mid-Spring and
attended the trainings over the summer. I am using this opportunity now
to share what has happened since the training and to provide a few
thoughts about how non-profits can benefit from search engine
optimization, even with small non-corporate budgets.

The OER Commons Web site contains collections of Open Educational
Resources - free, high-quality teaching and learning resources, many of
them with licenses (Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License, or
others) that designate the materials as free and open for use, sharing,
and adapting. The goal is to make these resources available to
everyone, including those in developing countries with little access to
textbooks or other quality educational materials. Since the public
launch in March, content, traffic, and visibility of the site have all
steadily increased. There are now over 15,000 resources from about 100
partners, and the site is a 2007 Education Award Laureate for the San Jose Tech Museum Awards.

The first steps in our search engine optimization campaign were to
take care of some of the basic on-site issues. Many good things were
already in place (static URLs, rich content, descriptive title tags), so
I started by identifying and addressing duplicate content and indexing
issues. We actually had a considerable amount of duplicate content in
Google. Not nearly as bad as Bill Slawski's record of finding 15,000
URLs for the same site, but we still had duplicate content because we
had not redirected from the .com and the non-www sites to our main site,
www.oercommons.org. We implemented 301 redirects, set our preferred
domain in Google, and we now have a minimal amount of duplicate content.

At the same time as we implemented the redirects, we also replaced a
generic Meta Description tag with unique Meta Descriptions for each of
our resources. I saw the effects of these two changes when performing a
site:oercommons.org search in Google. We went from "Results 1-2 of about
91,900" to having all of our results displayed and never seeing the
prompt to repeat the search with the omitted results included.

The "Content is King" motto has proved true for the site. We
routinely add new content (and automatically update the site map), and
the search engines regularly crawl the site. Often new content is in the
search engine indexes within a day of being added to the site. Our
referrals from all of the search engines have increased in the past
ninety days, and we have several keywords in the top ten results,
including some number one results. Even though most of our content is in
English, we have still had visitors from over 200 countries and
territories. To help our goal of reaching those in developing countries,
we are adding more content in other languages, and will be looking
towards optimizing for non-English language search engines.

SMX Advanced had a great session about social media marketing,
including a discussion about which sites to use, the demographic-typical
social media audience, and effective ways to use social media sites.
Ideally, we would have had someone with extensive social network
connections already in place that could devote significant time on those
networks promoting our site. However, we are a non-profit, and we are
all older than the general audience of most social media sites. With our
limited resources, we have done our best to leverage what we have, and
here is what has worked for us in the social media field.

We do not try to get on the front page of Digg. We don't have an
account (or 30) on every social networking site in existence. We do have
Google Alerts for topical phrases and monitor the RSS feeds of some of
the popular sites (Lifehacker, Mashable, etc.), and comment when
appropriate. These comments, even on older posts, have brought us a good
amount of traffic. We are selectively involved in social networking
sites, particularly Facebook, and we have developed an initial Facebook
application (OER Daily) for OER Commons that has brought us visibility
and traffic. We hope to do a lot more in this regard, as other social
networking platforms open up as well.

Outreach to bloggers was another task I had mentioned in May. Finding
relevant blogs was actually fairly easy - one of the leaders in this
field publishes his OPML file (over 600 feeds). I pruned the list, and
started spending a couple of hours a day monitoring the landscape via
Google Reader. I made comments as appropriate, and developed a list of
people we could contact regarding project announcements. This did give
us a good amount of press, visibility, and inbound links, but it was
more straight marketing than social in nature.

I attended a conference on open educational resources in September,
and finally got to meet in person many of these people who had just been
names attached to feeds. I am using Facebook and Twitter to keep in
contact with them, and will have a much easier time when next asking for
some links and coverage in a blog. The next steps are to see which
voting sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) are popular with this group, and
to become part of that network.

At Bruce Clay's SEO Training classes this summer, I learned many
techniques that could be used to improve a Web site's rankings in the
search engines. I have been able to implement several changes that have
had a positive impact on our site, and am grateful for all that I have
learned. As I am now employed with ISKME, I have the pleasure of being
involved with this project beyond just a few hours a week of donating my
time, and look forward to helping the site to improve.

Keri Morgret is the OER coordinator at the Institute for the
Study of Knowledge Management in Education, where she supports research
and analysis efforts in the development of global OER initiatives. Her
background and interests include online learning, usability, information
design, social media, search engines, and information retrieval. Keri
received her M.A. in Learning, Design, and Technology from Stanford
University.

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